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Early fall is the best time of the year for tomatoes, and of those available at farmer’s markets, farm stands and grocery stores, heirlooms are the tastiest, most interesting tomatoes on the market. If you’ve ever bitten into a perfectly ripe Brandywine, or savored slices of an Old German varietal, you know the joy that is an heirloom tomato!

Heirloom tomatoes are classified as such when the plants’ seeds have been passed down from generation-to-generation, when they are open-pollinated (meaning they are pollinated by insects and birds instead of by hand), and when there’s been no genetic modification of the plant. According to Wikipedia, seeds used to grow heirloom tomatoes must be at least 50 years old (some claim that heirloom seeds must be at least 100 year-old), as hybrid seeds entered the tomato growing industry in 1945 – at the end of World War II.

Regardless of the exact definition of what it means to be an heirloom tomato, the fact is that there are many varieties of these old-fashioned seeds available from growers all over the country. Gary Ibsen’s TomatoFest site offers over 600 different heirloom tomato seeds to growers interested in preserving this part of our nutritional past. Gardeners can purchase seeds that have been part of a family’s history and grow their own varieties wherever they live. And since heirlooms are all grown using open-pollination, the genetic make-up of the seeds changes over time, as pollinators introduce different genetic materials into the plant during pollination.

Some people don’t like heirloom tomatoes because they aren’t the shiny, bright red, round fruit that we’re used to finding in our grocery stores. Genetically modified tomatoes are produced to be hearty (for transportation), consistently sized (for easy harvesting and storage/transport), and flavored (because people want to know what they’re buying tastes like on a whole). Heirloom tomatoes come in all kinds of sizes and colors and range in flavor from sharp and bitter to juicy and sweet. When looking through boxes full of heirlooms, it’s easy to think that the farmers picked the rejected fruit from the vines and threw them into the bins labeled heirloom!

The difference in the appearance of these tomatoes is in large part due to the open-pollination of the seeds. With hand-pollinated tomatoes, farmers can control the genetic materials that mix with their plants. Once a seed is open-pollinated however, there’s no telling where the insects and birds have been and what pollen they’ve dropped in the process of pollinating your plants.

Here are just a few of the hundreds of heirlooms out there – if you want to taste food at its very best, try to find some locally grown heirlooms before the end of fall. Even if the fruit are funny looking and not what you’d normally expect in a tomato, I bet your mouth will thank you for your efforts!

Yellow Lollipop Cherry Tomatoes, available at TomatoSeeds.net, are small yellow tomatoes that have a sweet lemon-like flavor that is fruity and unique.

According to the folks behind the TomatoSeeds site, the Caspian Pink Tomato originated in southern Russia and produces 1 lb. pink beefsteak tomatoes that rival the famous Pink Brandywine for taste.

The Cherokee Purple, available from the Victory Seed Company, is over 100 years old – having been passed down from the Cherokee Tribes of North America, and is a good producer of medium sized, purple brown tomatoes with darker shoulders.

Offered by TomatoFest, the Peacevine Cherry Tomato is a tiny (dime-sized) tomato that grows in the hundreds per plant. These tomatoes have the highest Vitamin C content of any tomato and, because of their high amino acid content, have a calming effect on the body according to TomatoFest.

Yellow and red in color, these Arkansas Marvels are beefsteaks that can grow to be up to 1 pound. According to the growers behind the TomatoFest site, these beauties have a mild, peach flavor and produce a good yield on the vine.

I hope you find some delicious tomatoes this fall – and let me know if you have tips on how best to prepare these beauties, though I dare say it’s difficult to beat slicing them right off the vine and gobbling the fruit up while it’s still warm from the sun!

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Tags: Brandywine Tomatoe, Cherokee Purple, Cherry tomato, Heirloom, Heirloom tomato, Plant, Seed, Tomato, Tomatoes

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Gardening, Green Buying, Mainstream and Green, Organic Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.